AMER.ICAN ENCOUNTER. BY HÉCTOR. TOBAR. BOOK LEARNING I n 1962, my father immigrated with my mother to the United States from Gualán, a Guatemalan village of five thousand or so people, where men wore machetes dangling from their belts and women washed their laundry in the nearby Motagua River. He began his new life working as a busboy at a Hollywood cafeteria, but he soon got a job as a valet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel; from there, he made his way up the ranks. By the nineteen-seventies, he was the king of the hotel-its all-powerful front-office manager. Billionaires turned to him for help when they wanted to book a room for their mistresses. A Saudi prince requiring a palatial suite had to seek my father's assistance. He knew the most eccentric whims of such celebrities as Walt Disney, Tiny Tim, and Frank Sinatra (an exemplary tipper). When I was an awkward thirteen- year-old, my father gave me a paperback that distilled the secret of his success in the United States into a few simple principles. "Everything you need to know is in here," he told me. The book was Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," the quintessential American self-help manual, which was first published in 1936. For a year or so, I carried it around, memorizing its odd parables about salesmen, prime ministers, and presidents. One section in particular, "Fundamental Techniques in Handling People," helped me to understand my father's mastery of the congenial rapport of the Beverly Hilton, with its palm-shaded swimming pools, deep carpets, and high-ceilinged lobby (which, to my eyes, was primarily a marble arena for women draped in fur and men in tuxedos). But the book was filled with practical imperatives: "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language." Or: "Don't criticize, condemn or complain." 1 9 THF NF\Y/ vnRKFR nrTnRFR It:; 9()()1 " , '--' "I Today; I can see, with the clarity of an additional decade or two, what Dale Carnegie was really doing. Whether or not he knew it, he was teaching Americans how to be more Latin-how to conduct themselves with the grace and toque humano that comes naturally to Guatemalan provincials. My father didn't need Carnegie's reminder to "smile" (Principle No.2 of "Six Ways to Make People Like You") or to "make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely" (Principle No.6). He had learned those lessons in his hometown. In Guatemala, when you step into someone's home, he greets you with an embrace, feeds you (even if he doesn't have much to eat himself), and peppers the conversation with polite titles such as don or licenciado or capitán. A good guatemalteco is always late for his next appoIntment, because he feels too obliged to his hosts to say goodbye, and because in his Latin heart he knows that time spent in good company is more rewarding than punctualit)T. "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was merely a codification of what my father already knew. I remember tagging along with him one Saturday, when I was about eleven years old. He cut a dashing figure in those days, resplendent in a dark suit with shiny tie clips and cufflinks-a Mayan Ricky Ricardo. I trailed in the wake of his cologne as he embraced the shoe-shine men, flirted with the round, shy Mexican maids, shook hands with the bellhops and asked them about their cars, their mothers, their girlfìi.ends. A linebacker from the Los Angeles Rams wandered past. (The team always stayed at the hotel on the night before a home game.) "Mr. Robertson, is everything O.K. in your room?" my father asked-never mind that he despised football, which he saw as the epitome of American coarseness. I grew older without mastering the Carnegie creed. I was more taken with another book that my father had given me, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," which he had read while earning his high-school diploma at an adult- education school. The dark shadings of Sinclair's turn-of-the-century Chicago were more in tune with my melancholy disposition, I suppose. The other day, I took my father to a book fair in Los Angeles, where I read from my first novel, a sort of 'Jungle" reset in a Los Angeles underworld of homeless immigrants. In the authors' greenroom, my father spotted a swarthy man standing over the croissants at the complimentary buffet. "Mire," my father said in Spanish. "It's Deepak Chopra! Let's go say hello." He wa1ked quickly toward Chopra, with a self- confidence reaffirmed, no doubt, by "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success." They ta1ked as if they were fast friends: "Deepak, this is my son. He's a writer too. . ." Dale Carnegie and Latin charm had long ago taken my father as far as he could go in corporate America. When we drove home, he explained the importance of Chopràs call to ï= "acceptance" while we waited for traffic to thin out on the Santa Monica Freewa "Everything you need to c.:: know," he told me, "is in that book." . 9